The cover of A Criminal Appeal, by D.R. Schanker, says "The truth doesn't always set you free. Sometimes it takes a damn good lawyer." Actually, this story puts the lie to that statement, showing instead that achieving justice sometimes has nothing to do with the law, but rather comes down to simple faith, tenacity, and hard-headedness. Also, being big-boned seems to genetically predispose Schanker's protagonist, Nora Lumsey, for the role of the crusader.

Nora is a newly-minted lawyer working as a clerk for an appeals court judge in Indiana who has before him an appeal dealing with a robbery and shooting of an elderly white woman allegedly committed by a 10-year-old, deaf Black boy named Dexter. Nora is assigned Dexter's appeal and the judge instructs her to write an opinion affirming the conviction. Under ordinary circumstances, Nora would feel only an ordinary level of sympathy and pity for the boy whose life will be wasted serving a 55-year sentence for murder. But it turns out that Dexter's grandfather, Carl, who submitted Dexter's appeal, lives two houses away from Nora. And, as Nora reminds us throughout the story, being big-boned has endowed her with an inordinate amount of stubborn righteousness, and she wants to try to help Dexter.

Curious about the circumstances of the case, and heedless of the conflict inherent in a judge's clerk independently investigating the case, not to mention the blatant violation of judicial rules and ethics, Nora seeks out Carl's acquaintance. Almost instantly, she finds herself being drawn into the case, being invited by Carl to attend church with him, to go to the reform school to meet Dexter, and to meet Dexter's former teacher, named Owedia. Owedia's persistent efforts to involve Nora in trying to free Dexter are met with feeble resistance (Nora tells her she can't get too involved because "I work for the State.") and eventually Nora finds herself enmeshed in the search for the truth of who committed the murder. She fails to convince the judge to overturn the conviction, and despite the danger to her career, she continues to pursue the case, following up leads that take her into seedy neighborhoods and into a world of gang violence she has never experienced firsthand. When the situation turns dangerous, possibly deadly, Nora's big-boned bravado and Owedia's deeply religious faith carry them through.

The major themes in the story are the nature of racial prejudice, the fallibility of the judicial system, and the importance of community and individuals helping others. In the face of corrupt and ambitious politicians, a porous judicial system that allows innocent people to slip through the cracks, and a religious establishment incestuously involved with political machines, it is the individuals willing to put their faith and convictions on the line -- those who will not walk away or hide behind pragmatism -- who set the best example in this story and who accomplished true justice. The story is engaging and uplifting even when the plot takes depressing turns. As a lawyer, Schenker understands his subject matter very well and is able to translate the legal jargon effectively for the lay person. Schenker writes an engaging story which was rewarded with a nomination in 1999 for the prestigious Edgar Award.

The cover of A Criminal Appeal, by D.R. Schanker, says "The truth doesn't always set you free. Sometimes it takes a damn good lawyer." Actually, this story puts the lie to that statement, showing instead that achieving justice sometimes has nothing to do with the law, but rather comes down to simple faith, tenacity, and hard-headedness. Also, being big-boned seems to genetically predispose Schanker's protagonist, Nora Lumsey, for the role of the crusader.

Nora is a newly-minted lawyer working as a clerk for an appeals court judge in Indiana who has before him an appeal dealing with a robbery and shooting of an elderly white woman allegedly committed by a 10-year-old, deaf Black boy named Dexter. Nora is assigned Dexter's appeal and the judge instructs her to write an opinion affirming the conviction. Under ordinary circumstances, Nora would feel only an ordinary level of sympathy and pity for the boy whose life will be wasted serving a 55-year sentence for murder. But it turns out that Dexter's grandfather, Carl, who submitted Dexter's appeal, lives two houses away from Nora. And, as Nora reminds us throughout the story, being big-boned has endowed her with an inordinate amount of stubborn righteousness, and she wants to try to help Dexter.

Curious about the circumstances of the case, and heedless of the conflict inherent in a judge's clerk independently investigating the case, not to mention the blatant violation of judicial rules and ethics, Nora seeks out Carl's acquaintance. Almost instantly, she finds herself being drawn into the case, being invited by Carl to attend church with him, to go to the reform school to meet Dexter, and to meet Dexter's former teacher, named Owedia. Owedia's persistent efforts to involve Nora in trying to free Dexter are met with feeble resistance (Nora tells her she can't get too involved because "I work for the State.") and eventually Nora finds herself enmeshed in the search for the truth of who committed the murder. She fails to convince the judge to overturn the conviction, and despite the danger to her career, she continues to pursue the case, following up leads that take her into seedy neighborhoods and into a world of gang violence she has never experienced firsthand. When the situation turns dangerous, possibly deadly, Nora's big-boned bravado and Owedia's deeply religious faith carry them through.

The major themes in the story are the nature of racial prejudice, the fallibility of the judicial system, and the importance of community and individuals helping others. In the face of corrupt and ambitious politicians, a porous judicial system that allows innocent people to slip through the cracks, and a religious establishment incestuously involved with political machines, it is the individuals willing to put their faith and convictions on the line -- those who will not walk away or hide behind pragmatism -- who set the best example in this story and who accomplished true justice. The story is engaging and uplifting even when the plot takes depressing turns. As a lawyer, Schenker understands his subject matter very well and is able to translate the legal jargon effectively for the lay person. Schenker writes an engaging story which was rewarded with a nomination in 1999 for the prestigious Edgar Award.

Butterscotch Blues, by Margaret Johnson-Hodge, treats the reader to a realistic, complex story about love, female friendship, AIDS, and death. A group of four friends, Sandy, Janice, Britney, and Martha, search for romantic love and self-truth, wondering and learning whether the two are mutually exclusive. Through all their tribulations and triumphs, the constant factor that sustains them is their love and support of each other.

The story begins with Sandy, the main character, breaking up with a neglectful, detached boyfriend and meeting Adrian, a caring, thoughtful, and emotionally-available man. She is drawn to Adrian in part because of his light-skinned, African American beauty, a contrast to her own mahogany hue, and is surprised to find that he is actually more interested in and knowledgeable about his African heritage than she is. Sandy finds more respect and happiness in her relationship with Adrian than she has ever had, and much of what she learns she passes on to her other three friends. The other women experience various common facets of dating, including: meeting the man of one's dreams (Britney, who dates Maurice, a kind and generous suitor); having to reassess artificially high standards (Martha, who won't date anyone who's not a white-collar worker); and learning not to lower one's standards too much because of low self-esteem (Janice, who gets involved with a man who uses her and cruelly dumps her).

A crisis ensues between Adrian and Sandy when Sandy learns that Adrian has a wife, Gennifer, and that he and Gennifer are both HIV positive, the result of Gennifer's infidelity. After much soul searching, Sandy overcomes her fear of infection and losing Adrian to the deadly disease and decides that their love is strong enough to sustain them. Later events shake that resolve and cause Sandy and her friends to readjust their views about what true love means and to alter their decisions about the commitments they make.

Butterscotch Blues is a moving, realistic depiction of friendship between women and the decisions women make in regard to their romantic relationships. The dialogue, situations, and characters ring true. An interesting theme throughout the story is the interracial bigotry that occurs between Blacks based on the lightness of their skin, and is illustrated by Sandy's feelings about the messages her family has sent her regarding her dark-skinned appearance. The author's poignant treatment of AIDS as a potentially fatal disease highlights the fact that there is no cure and that despite improved treatment AIDS is still a serious pandemic. The best part of the book is that not only do the characters learn valuable lessons, but the reader does as well.

The Authenticator, by William M. Valtos, crosses genres from mystery to romance to fantasy in a tale that delves into the possibility of near death experience (NDE). The Authenticator, the eponymous protagonist, is Theophanes Nikonos, a psychologist with a Ph.D. who is down on his luck and working for short money as a researcher for a Professor interested in NDE's. Theo is investigating a claim of an NDE by a car crash victim, Laura Duquesne, who returned to life after having been declared legally dead for one hour and twenty minutes. What starts out as a routine interview by the skeptical Theo turns into a dangerous, life-threatening pursuit of the truth behind the mysterious circumstances of the death of Laura's husband, Harrison, whom she claims didn't perish in the car accident, knowledge she gained in her visit to the "other side" during her NDE.

Laura is convinced her husband is still alive, despite the existence of a corpse matching his medical description and an iron-clad coroner's confirmation, because when she "died" and experienced her NDE, she didn't see her husband amongst all her other dead relatives who greeted her. When Theo meets Laura, she is being held against her will in a rehabilitation clinic and she begs him to help her escape. Theo, convinced of the authenticity of her NDE and having begun to fall in love with her, rescues her from the clutches of her captors, and agrees to help her find her husband, whom she passionately loves and believes is still alive.

The mystery deepens when people connected to the case begin turning up dead (one is murdered in Theo's apartment), and when Laura's captors pursue her. On the run with Laura, Theo learns more about the circumstances of the accident and about her husband's character, and becomes suspicious that he may be alive after all. He also wonders about the possible role Laura's NDE played in her captivity. With their own lives now in danger, Theo and Laura retrace the events of the fateful day of the car crash to try to unravel the mystery before they are both killed or Theo is arrested for murder.

The Authenticator is an enjoyable and intriguing story, well-plotted and gripping. The book includes plenty of interesting information about NDE's as well as other psychological conditions, but towards the end its tone is excessively didactic. Another weakness, one that does not really harm the overall story but that is disappointing and annoying, is that Laura is portrayed as thoroughly gullible and naive, an empty vessel waiting for some man to fill her up. I prefer stronger female characters. The final chapters are a little heavy-handed and repetitive of information previously mentioned at the beginning of the book in the description of one of the characters' NDE. Finally, the plot suffers somewhat from predictability, but still provides pleasure as the reader awaits the inevitable twists and turns. Overall, the book was a substantive, satisfying read, and I would recommend it.

The Comfort Queen's Guide to Life is a compassionate and fun book that helps you discover you what aspects of your life need nurturing, and then takes you through the steps to accomplish the basic goal of being true to yourself. The approach isn't self-centered like many self-help type books -- it doesn't recommend that you live in a hermitage and ditch all your commitments and responsibilities. Instead, it helps you hone your list of wants, needs, dreams and goals and then gives you some options about how to attain them. There are several chapters devoted to "Living the Questions," exercises that ask simple questions that you can use over and over to guage your moods, focus your energy, help you relax, and be present in your feelings. Other chapters contain exercises asking you to fantasize about the outermost limits of your destiny and then making suggestions about how to get there. The "Comfort Queen" serves as the author's alter ego, helping her and the reader through the process of self-discovery. The point of the book is that every woman (the book is really directed at women) has her own Comfort Queen, an inner voice to whom she can turn for the answers. Or, the reader can borrow Jennifer Louden's Comfort Queen, and I for one am grateful for her generosity in sharing her.

The Brethren, by John Grisham, is a tale of corruption, politics and the purchase of public office, and Machiavellian, single-minded evil. These themes are fertile grounds for suspense and mystery and would seem infallible subjects for successful storytelling. Unfortunately, John Grisham was unable to reap the potential from his novel's original promising scenario. The story is about the accidental nexus between three inmates and a presidential candidate.

Three former judges, who call themselves The Brethren, are serving time in a federal prison. In addition to presiding over their own kangaroo court to adjudicate fellow inmates' grievances, they spend their time conniving at a scheme to blackmail unsuspecting homosexual pen pals who correspond with them. Once they get sufficiently damning letters written by the risk-taking and hopefully wealthy men, the judges, posing as young gay men confined to drug rehabilitation clinics looking for friendship, demand hush money from their correspondents.

The other main story line is about Congressman Aaron Lake, an insignificant member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Arizona. He is chosen by the head of the C.I.A., Teddy Maynard, to run for President as a single-issue, pro-defense candidate. Lake's candidacy will be bought and paid for by the C.I.A. and the nation's defense contractors, in exchange for which he will double the Pentagon's budget. Lake passively agrees to the scheme. To assure Lake's success in the primaries, Maynard ignores intelligence he has received in advance about pending terrorist attacks and allows them to take place in order to focus the electorate's attention on the need for increased defense spending.

It is not until Chapter 15, more than a third of the way through the book, that it is finally revealed how these two story lines will intersect. The Brethren's gay pen pal scam has inadvertently snared Aaron Lake, who responded to one of their ads in a gay magazine prior to his decision to run for President. The rest of the story focuses on the C.I.A.'s unraveling of the mystery of the identity of Lake's correspondent, and then averting the public relations crisis presented by the threat of exposure. Much of the action details the C.I.A.'s surveillance of the Brethren and their lawyer, and of Lake himself. As in all of John Grisham's books, there is a great deal of tedious discussion about the ins and outs of hiding and transferring huge sums of money, as well as how fugitives disappear while living lives of luxury.

The story is unsatisfying for three reasons. First, Grisham takes too long to make the connection between the Brethren and Lake, during which time he bores the reader with facile and oversimplified descriptions of political campaigning, fundraising, and other such incidentals that add nothing to the suspense of the plot. Secondly, Grisham leaves some plot lines dangling, (such as when one of the Brethren's other victims succeeds in tracking them down and then abruptly leaves town), and introduces other plot lines that are superfluous (such as the arrival and escape of a young inmate named Buster whom the Brethren aid in his flight). Finally, Grisham does not make the most of the tension that could have been created once the Brethren finally realized that one of their pen pals was a presidential candidate, choosing instead to avert the crisis quickly through C.I.A. intervention. Overall, this is not one of Grisham's best. If you're expecting one of his typical page-turners, you'll be disappointed. He seems to have taken a fork in the road leading to authorial sloppiness and lassitude that will be a disappointment for fans of his previous work.

Phoenix: A Brother's Life, by J.D. Dolan, is an autobiographical account of the author's relationship with his family, primarily with his older brother who died of severe burns suffered during a devastating workplace explosion. The book spans the abbreviated life of John Dolan, the author J.D. "Jay" Dolan's older brother, and muses primarily on their relationship in a series of flashbacks and reflections that take place during Jay's death vigil over his mortally-wounded brother.

The narrative sets forth the dynamics of the Dolan family, consisting of the parents, the sons John and Jay, and their three sisters, whose characters are slightly less fleshed out and who are more like satellites orbiting the more assertive brothers. The family persona is summarized quickly: the mother is a typical, nondescript housewife; the father looms as a sullen, bitter disciplinarian who passes on to his children the habit of holding longstanding, silent grudges; the oldest sister is defiantly independent while the other two sisters stay closer to home and exchange sibling rivalries; the older brother John is a stoic automotive enthusiast who gets drafted for duty in Vietnam; and Jay is the youngest child born after his parents were in their forties, the forgotten child observing the family drama and being raised more by his siblings than his parents.

The story focuses on Jay's hero worship of John and contains many a male bonding vignette, including forays into the woods where John teaches Jay to target shoot, as well as their shared love of cars and motorcycles and the ceremonial passing of the torch (in the form of a Marine Corps sweatshirt) when John is drafted and goes off to war in Vietnam (he actually gets sent to Japan). Despite their adolescent closeness, in later years John severs all communication with Jay for reasons we never really discover, which incidentally is one of the only unsatisfying aspects of the story. The brothers and the rest of the family are reunited by tragedy, when John is injured in a steam heat explosion at the Southern California Edison's Mohave Generating Station in which sixteen people were injured, six of whom died.

John's abrupt decision to terminate his relationship with Jay mirrors their father's habit of doing likewise. Their father enforces the petty grudges he holds by refusing to speak to people who draw his ire, including his oldest daughter because she bought an impractical, flash car (a Thunderbird) and later stayed out past curfew on a single occasion, and also his own brother for undisclosed reasons that lasted until the brother was on his deathbed. The repetition by John of this corrosive, emotionally-constipated withholding of communication and love from Jay is what makes this story so poignant, as Jay struggles to reconcile the unresolved feud while bidding a final farewell to his brother.

Although it is nonfiction, the story reads like a novel, weaving past and present narratives adeptly. The writing is thoroughly masculine and spare, in the style of Hemingway, without being obviously imitative or jarring. Overall, the story is engaging albeit a little depressing because it does not deliver the catharsis the reader -- and no doubt Jay -- hopes for. No clear answers or endings are delivered, but then perhaps that is what separates fact from fiction, and J.D. Dolan succeeds in conveying a message about the importance of family bonds and the unconditional love that underlie them.

The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser is a semi-autobiographical book of short essays. The chapters are in a loosely chronological order, only some pertaining directly to the author's life and career path; the others are simply essays on topics that interest the author. The confusing format of the book -- part memoir and part essay collection -- is a macrocosm for what is wrong with not only the book as a whole but the writing in particular. The book follows no plan or path, and arrives at no ultimate destination, fitting neither genre snugly. Moreover, the essays themselves are unfulfilling, leaving out much detail and ending or changing direction abruptly, neither satisfying as a group nor as individual pieces.

The cardinal rule for writing an autobiography is that the author should have led an interesting life that the reader will want to learn and read about. This is the first major problem with Wendy Lesser's book. She has written about her life and no doubt her close friends and relatives will enjoy reading about it, but I did not. She is a native Californian daughter of divorced parents who was educated in the lofty surroundings of Radcliffe College and in the company of some illustrious classmates (most notably Benazir Bhutto, the future president of Pakistan, whom she then affectionately called "Pinkie"). After college she spent time as a consultant to various liberal and governmental organizations advising them on the more esoteric aspects of social justice policy. She finally found her calling as a writer and editor, and has published several books, in addition to founding and editing The Threepenny Review, a literary journal. I'm not sure why, but I found myself saying repeatedly to myself, as I read this woman's memoirs, "Who cares?" It may be that Lesser focused too much on the details of her life that would have been more appropriate in a journal, while ignoring the more interesting bits. I would have liked to have read more about the genesis and life of her publication, The Threepenny Review, rather than about her childhood, her hobbies, her self-admittedly insignificant consulting career, and her opinions about culture.

Lesser's writing on any one subject, whether it interested me or not, lacked cohesion and sometimes even a point. Her sentences were often abrupt and choppy, and lacked explanation. For instance, in describing her college days at Radcliffe, she whets the reader's appetite with her mention of "Pinkie" Bhutto, initially describing her as "innocently giggly and high-spirited," and later "brassily ditzy, bubble-brained," but then says "long after I had ceased to see her, she all at once dropped the mask and became a serious, wily politician, her father's rightful heir. The change seemed sudden; yet if you had asked me, even as a freshman, to guess who among my acquaintance would eventually become a world-famous political figure, I would not have hesitated to answer, 'Pinkie Bhutto.'" And there she ends her narrative, leaving me asking, "Why did you think that?" That is a question I found myself asking repeatedly throughout her book.

Another failing of Lesser's writing is that it seems not to have been edited all that well -- a supreme irony since Lesser's main claim to fame is that she is an editor -- and many times I was left to wonder why she included certain sentences or whole passages, since they made no sense to me. I found myself writing "What? and Huh?" in the margins a lot, when for instance she described a boyfriend's studio thusly: "The smell of the place was close and oppressive, as if several pairs of sexually active old shoes and socks had been closeted together for weeks." What does this mean? Another egregious error in editing comes as she inadvertently draws a metaphor for her own inept writing, when she writes: "For a year or two I had been writing monthly book reviews for a local organ called the San Francisco Review of Books, which ranged in quality from the somewhat interesting to the truly atrocious (ranged within each issue, I mean). She probably meant that the books ranged from somewhat interesting to truly atrocious, but her misuse of syntax makes this sentence mean that her reviews ranged in quality. Unforgivable for a self-styled wordsmith to write this way, and even less forgivable for a self-proclaimed editor not to have caught the mistake. Moreover, the author seems not to grasp the basic Strunk and White rule about when to use "I" or "me," which she bungles on the very first page of her book and again in the second chapter.

Finally, Lesser has a truly annoying habit of assuming information in referring to certain literary or artistic works in a shorthand way that makes the reader seem ignorant if their significance does not leap to mind. She also is a name-dropper, a pretension that is unnecessarily belittling to the reader. I do not recommend reading The Amateur, precisely because its title holds the key to why it was so poorly written.

I read this book in its entirety in one night, something I have rarely done before. I felt compelled to turn the next page, to find out the outer boundaries of the horror that Brenda/David suffered -- just how much worse could it get? Before one finds out, though, one must work through the first third of the book, which consists of a discussion of the psychology and science behind the decision to reassign gender. This part of the book was fascinating, but I found that its length and depth was not entirely necessary for an understanding of David's situation, and was anxious to get to the rest of the story. The author did make a successful effort to present the science and controversy over Brenda/David's doctor's (Dr. Money) widely-accepted and also less conventional views in an objective manner, and I appreciate this.

The second part of the book focuses on the specifics of Brenda's condition and her life until her decision to revert to her original gender and become David. This is the most gripping part of the book. The author's sensitive treatment of the travails that Brenda suffered made me feel as if I was traveling along with her on her collision course with her true gender identity. The author avoids sentimentality, but treats the subject sensitively. He does not rail unduly against the doctors who changed the course of Brenda's life, but instead acts as a detached narrator laying before the reader the facts.

The third part of the book is a look at the issue of the transformation and reassignment of intersexed children in general, and a view of the advocacy now being taken up on their behalf. Mostly silenced by shame and fear, former intersexed children have begun to join forces and argue for a change in the medical protocols established primarily by Brenda/David's doctors at Johns Hopkins, especially Dr. Money, and widely adopted by the medical establishment, which call for surgical sexual reassignment of intersexed children. This part of the book gives the author the forum to voice what is probably his own view towards these practices, without unduly intruding as an outsider and journalist. Instead, he prefers to speak through the voices of the victims of such practices and implies his skepticism gently and unobtrusively.

It is obvious that the author did a thorough and excellent job in reasearching his topic. He does not hammer the reader with sermons or preaching, but rather relies on as much fact-based logic and the irrefutable emotional damage that David suffered at the hands of his tormenters. I respect this author's work, and above all appreciate the strength and character of David. I highly recommend this book.

I don't want to repeat much of what has already been said by previous reviewers, (most of the negative stuff I agree with) so I'll focus on the part of the book I thought was meritorious. I gave this book two stars to credit the author with having provided some terrific recipes as well as describing in an enticing fashion the meals she cooked and ate, and the food of the region. Frankly, I think her writing efforts are misplaced -- she should focus on the food aspects of the region and write a cookbook -- I would buy it! Unfortunately, Ms. Mayes is not an engaging author in her attempts to describe the people, scenery and traditions of Tuscany. I will not make a moral judgment or speculate that the reason she has failed to connect to her surroundings is because she lacks certain personal characteristics. Rather, I prefer to think that she excells at what interests her most, which is cooking and food. So I hope she will concentrate her next book on food and leave the description of the flora, fauna, and folks of Tuscany to other talented authors who find such a topic truly interesting.